Morpho curators: market structure in 2025

Key Insights

• Morpho vaults doubled YoY, with $3.88B now curated across chains. The system has consolidated around a small set of managers: only 15 curators with >$10M in AUM.

• Market leadership flipped: Steakhouse and Gauntlet now each manage >$1B (up from ~$120M–$270M last year), while Spark fell back to ~$400M as Spark Liquidity Layer allocations reduced off Morpho.

• Liquidity in Morpho concentrated heavily into USDC/USDT across chains. On Ethereum, USDC+USDT represent ~64–94% of curated supply depending on curator, on Base and HyperEVM, USDC regularly exceeds 90% of deposited assets.

• Performance fees remain a core competitive factor between curators (clustered at 5–10%, often dropped to 0% for bootstrapping). Management fees were introduced in 2025 with Vaults V2 but are almost never used. This keeps the market extremely fee-competitive and pushes curators to differentiate by strategy quality, partnerships and integrations.

• Incentives and integrations drive deposit flow more than anything else. Merkl enables rapid, granular reward campaigns; Spark's Liquidity Layer, Steakhouse's RWA partnerships, and frontend integrations (Coinbase, Instadapp, Idle) act as major routing funnels that move large volumes into specific vaults.

Why do Morpho vaults and curators matter?

Morpho rebuilt DeFi lending around efficient, isolated markets instead of one shared risk pool.

Rather than accepting a blended rate and opaque risk exposure, Morpho lets "curators", asset managers, configure specific collateral/borrow pairs with defined caps, rate curves, and risk rules. This structure gives lenders higher capital efficiency and cleaner transmission of demand into interest rates.

Morpho also abstracts away complexity for liquidity providers. It surfaces far clearer information about who is managing deposits, how funds are being reallocated, and what drives expected APY. For users, this turns fragmented lending markets into a single interface with observable performance and risk.

Liquidity curation, with vault design and strategy, sit at the core of Morpho's growth.

The system allows anyone to deploy vaults with different risk profiles, in an entirely permissionless way. Understanding how these vaults operate, how they compete, and how they attract liquidity is key to understanding the lending platform's trajectory.

Vaults in Morpho

A Morpho vault is a permissionless, ERC-4626–compatible lending wrapper that pools deposits and allocates them across one or more Morpho lending markets. Each market is an isolated, immutable pool that pairs a single collateral asset with a single loan asset. Instead of depositing into individual markets and managing risk parameters manually, Morpho users deposit into a vault and earn yield generated by borrowers, while allocation, caps, and risk exposure are actively curated by a vault manager.

Morpho vaults exist in two main versions. Vaults V1 are built directly on top of Morpho Markets V1 and allocate deposits across a fixed set of isolated lending markets with simple, per-market supply caps. Vaults V2 was launched in 2025 and generalizes the V1 model by introducing an adapter architecture which allows for more granular risk controls and the ability to design vaul allocating across multiple Morpho yield sources.

Vault adoption is a strong indicator of overall growth and evolution on Morpho. As more capital flows through curated vaults, the protocol benefits from higher utilisation and deeper borrower markets.

Liquidity managers earn revenue through a few channels. In V1 and V1.1 vaults, curators typically retain a share of performance fees taken from the native yield paid to depositors. They can also split fees with distributors or partners via onchain splitters or offchain agreements.

With Morpho Vaults V2, a second revenue stream appears: management fees charged on AUM. In practice, these remain rare. Currently, none of the vaults with more than $1M AUM on Ethereum or Base charge them, with some exceptions that waive performance in exchange for management fee structures.

Most vaults today charge 5–10% performance and commonly drop to 0% when attracting early borrowers. Because V2 vaults can allocate into V1 markets, curators can still capture fees at the underlying level even when charging 0% at the V2 layer.

Morpho in Numbers

Overview of Market Size Liquidity

• Market size liquidity for Morpho is $9.18B. It is concentrated on Ethereum ($4.16B), Base ($3.36B), and Hyperliquid ($565M), followed by Katana ($399M), Arbitrum ($340M), and Unichain ($42M). Base has dominated non-mainnet liquidity for the past three months.

• Stablecoins make up ~41% of total market size liquidity on Morpho, driven by the non-yield-bearing and centralized type, USDC.

• Centralized assets dominate: USDC and cbBTC together represent ~42% of liquidity on Ethereum and ~93% on Base.

• Of the ~$1.09B USDC currently supplied to Morpho on Ethereum, ~$514M (47.2%) is managed by Steakhouse Financial deposited via two vaults. Roughly half of the Morpho's USDC supply in Ethereum is routed through a single vault manager.

Immediate borrowable capacity in Morpho Blue markets (Ethereum)

This section measures immediate borrowable capacity in Morpho Blue markets at month-end. Unlike market size or assets under curation, this metric captures unused borrowing available to borrowers and to vault allocators deploying into Blue markets.

• Across 2025, Morpho Blue’s borrowable liquidity on Ethereum ranged from roughly $331M (January) to a peak of about $798M (August). Immediate borrowing capacity varies substantially month to month.
• The month with the highest borrowable liquidity (August 2025, $798M) also had the highest total supplied capital ($3.28B).
• Utilization remained structurally high throughout the year but still moved meaningfully, tightening to ~86% in January and loosening to ~70% in May.

Asset Curation in Numbers

• Total Assets Under Curation on Morpho: $3.88B, more than double last year's $1.32B. Ethereum represents $1.87B and Base $1.28B.

• There are ~26 curators, but only 15 manage more than $10M in assets).

• One year ago, curator AUM across all chains was led by SparkDAO (≈$625M), Gauntlet (≈$622M), MEV Capital (≈$535M), and Steakhouse Financial (≈$438M). Today, Steakhouse Financial (≈$1.54B) and Gauntlet (≈$1.10B) lead in AUM, followed by SparkDAO (≈$253M) and Yearn (≈$129M).

• Vaults by chain: Vaults are predominantly in Ethereum (161), followed by Base (62) and Arbitrum (23).

V1 vs V2

• Total vault count: 978 V1/V1.1 vaults and 287 V2 vaults.

• Most vaults are still V1 (~77%). V2 vaults have not yet deployed on Unichain, where all vaults continue to charge a flat 10% performance fee.

• Across chains, performance fees cluster around 5–10%, often reduced to 0% to bootstrap liquidity.

• Management fees exist in V2 but remain uncommon and are usually waived or offset by eliminating performance fees.

Vault Composition

Exposure Across Vaults

• Low-risk vaults: cbBTC, WBTC, ETH, wstETH, Treasuries-backed stables (USDM, USYC). XAUt (Tether gold), PAXG (Paxos gold)

• Medium-risk vaults: LST and LRT assets: stUSDS, sUSDe, USDe. Pendle PT markets (PT iUSD, PT USDe). Structured or yield-bearing positions.

• High-risk vaults: syrupUSDC, mF-ONE, Strata Senior USDe, HYPE, and newer collateral types.

Asset Allocations: a closer look into 6 vault curators

Allocation naturally overlaps as most of the top 15 curators by AUM have at minimum 5 vaults across chains.

Among curators, USDC dominates stablecoin deposits, WETH and WBTC dominate in non-stable deposit assets. In terms of asset exposure, Pendle markets for Ethena dominate in the medium- to high-risk spectrum while cbBTC dominates in blue-chip vaults.

We will focus on 6 vault curators, below we expand on each curator strategy exposures, supply and most profitable vaults.

Steakhouse Financial

• Asset exposure by vault type

• Prime: blue-chip assets (ETH, wstETH, WBTC, cbBTC, tokenized gold).

• Smokehouse: Pendle markets, iUSD, siUSD, USDe derivatives, mF-ONE.

• Partnerships: RWA-focused partner vaults (Centrifuge, Angle, Superstate, Coinshift).

• Ethereum: USDC, USDT, WETH
• Base: USDC
• Arbitrum: USDC, USDT0
• Monad: AUSD
• Katana: vbUSD

• Total curated supply in Ethereum is over 93.8% allocated on to USDC and USDT
• Total curated supply across chains is 92.7% allocated to Non yield bearing stables, majority USDC.
• Steakhouse Financial's most profitable vaults in Q4 2025 are USDC. Their main fee revenue in Q4 2025 comes through an outlier vault, where they charge 25% in performance fees. Curious enough none of their top vaults in revenue are Smokehouse vaults.

Gauntlet

• Gauntlet manges 70+ vaults across many chains.

• Asset exposure by vault type:

  • Prime vaults: blue-chip assets (ETH, wstETH, WBTC, cbBTC).

  • Core: higher yield markets (siUSD, Pendle Markets srUSDE, stcUSD, LBTC, among others).

  • Frontier: higher volatility markets, including Pendle markets, Falcon XUSDC, RLP, stcUSD, syrupUSDC, among others.

  • Partnerships: SwissBorg, IndexCoop.

  • Specific market vaults: for example Metronome msETH vault or USDA Core, allocating across that asset's markets.

• Total curated supply per chain with >10M in volume:
  • Ethereum: USDC, USDT, WETH, WBTC.
  • Base: USDC and WETH.
  • Katana: vbETH, vbUSDC.
  • Arbitrum and Optimism: USDC.

• Total curated supply across chains is 67.6% allocated to Non yield bearing stables but a large portion (20.8%) is distributed to ETH derivatives

• Total curated supply in Ethereum is over 64% allocated on to USDC and USDT.

• Their most profitable vaults in the Q4 2025 are USDC and USDT based. Most of their fees were earned through Core and Frontier vaults and their Seamless USDC partnership vault.

MEV Capital

• MEV Capital manages 30 vaults across Ethereum, Base, and HyperEVM.

• Asset exposure by vault type:

  • Prime: risk adjusted yield and blue-chip assets (ETH, wstETH, WBTC, cbBTC)

  • Capital: higher yield markets (siUSD, Pendle Markets cUSD, RLP, LBTC, reUSD among others)

  • Partnership or dedicated vaults: sometimes they curate vaults dedicated to specific markets for example USUAL.

• Total curated supply per chain with >10M in volume: only one chain has assets with >10M in supplied: Ethereum with WETH, USDC.

• Total curated supply across chains is 44.4% in non yield bearing stables and 35% on ETH derivatives, with a big portion of Non-USD fiat stables, 15%.

• Their most profitable vaults in the Q4 2025 are MEV Capital WETH and USUAL partnership vaults.

Felix

• Felix is a fairly new curator, managing 7 vaults focused only on HyperEVM, but already the fifth curator in AUM (~$101M).

• Total curated supply is dedicated to HyperEVM, with >10M in volume in different assets: USDC, WHYPE, USDT0 and USDH. Notably with over 47% in HyperEVM assets.

Spark

• Spark manages 4 vaults across Ethereum and Base.

• Asset exposure by vault type:

  • Blue Chip vaults: USDC vaults allocated to cbBTC, wstETH.

  • Vaults dedicated to Sky and Spark assets (USDS and DAI) exposed to Pendle markets.

Both types of vaults are aimed to boost the returns of the Spark Liquidity Layer. In practice, SLL functions as a multi-protocol treasury for Maker's stablecoin reserves, moving assets wherever they can best improve liquidity, stabilize borrowing rates, and earn yield. Instead of siloed capital on single networks or underutilized in low-demand markets, SLL routes liquidity dynamically to increase capital efficiency and offering users consistent yields. Currently, only 7.5% of total SLL assets are distributed to Morpho, a reduction of about 10% since July.

Mainnet used to be their hub of SLL assets on Morpho, but over the last quarter, assets were removed of their most performant vault during Q3 2025 (Spark DAI vault). Base now accounts for 94% of Spark's deposits.

• Total curated supply of assets only surpasses 10M on USDC both on Base and Ethereum.

• Total curated supply across chains is over 99% allocated to USDC.

• Their most profitable vault during Q4 2025, also their largest, is the Spark USDC vault in Base.

KPK

• Kpk's trajectory in Morpho vaults is less than two months old.

• They curate vaults on Ethereum, each managed by two agents designed to continuously reallocate across low-risk, lending positions across multiple Morpho markets.

• Reallocations are managed entirely onchain under predefined risk rules (caps, tiers, collateral filters).

• Curation under KPK's agent-managed vaults mean: strict exposure rules, predefined market tiers, utilisation targets, Oracle requirements, whitelist-only markets, automated enforcement.

• Vaults are low risk USDC EURC and ETH and operate on whitelisted markets only, targeting DAOs and institutions as borrower-persona.

• Their supply is dedicated mostly to Ethereum, though also present in Arbitrum. Total curated supply in Ethereum is over 72% in USDC, but no asset exceeds $10M in supply.

Drivers of Vault Growth

Protocol-level drivers

• Morpho's upgrade from V1 to V2 changed how curators can architecture their vaults.

• The new role system (Owner, Curator, Allocator, Sentinel) and per-function timelocks give curators a tighter control over risk, caps, and strategy execution, enabling more sophisticated, institution-grade vault designs.

• Vaults can also be tied to other protocols, enabling curators to branch out of Morpho and tie it with other pools outside of protocol, or even re-allocate to existing V1 vaults.

• As always, incentives have been a motor for deposit growth. Morpho is planning to increase The Morpho Association's rewards budget by 14% and direct a higher share of incentives toward V2 vaults. This is expected to begin early January 2026

Incentive Drivers

• Merkl rewards is a major driver of short-term deposit flows. It makes it trivial for curators to launch granular, asset-specific incentive campaigns and to push rewards directly to suppliers and borrowers.

• Because vaults can forward rewards from underlying markets, incentive effects are often amplified, vaults benefit both from the curator's campaign and from incentives embedded in the borrower markets they tap into. This creates a feedback loop where even a small reward program can meaningfully shift liquidity toward targeted collateral pairs.

Economic drivers

• Vaults are highly price-competitive:

• The market has converged around 0% management (with no managment fees on >1M vaults) and 5–10% performance fees.

• Many curators temporarily drop performance fees to 0% to bootstrap liquidity (KPK, and several Re7 vaults are examples). This directly impacts the APY shown in the Morpho App, driving deposits.

• This dynamic pushes curators to differentiate through strategy quality, risk controls, and integrations rather than through fee extraction.

Ecosystem and Integration Drivers

Distribution matters.

• Integrations are becoming one of the strongest drivers of vault adoption.

• Spark uses Morpho as part of its Liquidity Layer, routing hundreds of millions through curated vaults.

• Steakhouse has RWA-focused partnership vaults with Coinshift, Angle, Centrifuge, and Superstate, bringing in capital that would not naturally arrive via Morpho's native UI.

• Kpk is leveraging their ecosystem ties to DAO treasuries to target low-risk deposits.

• On the aggregator side, Instadapp, Idle, and Summer.fi have listed Morpho vaults, while Coinbase has integrated Merkl rewards directly in-app, creating a new funnel of power users and automated routers.

As more frontends incorporate curated vaults, deposit flow is increasingly shaped by where users interact, not just by yields or fees.

Stablecoins: Is there a market for liquidity curation focused on decentralized stablecoins?

An Overview

• Stablecoins make up 35% of total Morpho liquidity. Market cap is still dominated by centralized fiat-backed stables:

• USDT and USDC dwarf everything else by market cap and liquidity, and they anchor most Morpho activity. Even as newer designs arrive, fiat-backed USD stables remain the real base layer of the system.

• As is this dynamic is hard to shift, as the only crypto-backed alternative with similar depth are Sky's USDS and Ethena's USDe.

• USDe, USDf and USR form an emerging class where peg stability comes from perp hedging and active management. These are integrated in Morpho via Re7, Alphaping and MEV Capital vaults, but curators compensate with conservative LTVs.

• Maker/Sky is actively migrating from DAI to USDS: DAI's design remains the template for overcollateralized crypto/RWA stables, but usage is shifting to USDS. These remain the most trusted option for the crypto-native aligned.

• Yield-bearing wrappers have become first-class exposure asset:

• sUSDS, sUSDe, sDAI, srUSD, BOLD stability-pool tokens, and even EURC yield strategies are treated not just as passive wrappers, but as primary strategies for vault design.

• Morpho's growth vector is clearly "stacked yield" on top of base stables, and the stablecoins winning integrations are the ones that ship a clean path to native yield.

The Stablecoin Landscape in Morpho

Is there a market for decentralized stablecoins?

There is a market, but it's not driven by ideology, but by yield, structure, and trust. Curators like Clearstar offer controlled exposure to Liquity's BOLD through the BOLD Reactor vault, and Felix experiments with more frontier stablecoin strategies (though still without feUSD variants), but demand concentrates around stablecoins that do something economically compelling.

• Offering a meaningful yield advantage through their vaults (Pendle-boosted, or delta-neutral variants like USDe).

• Delivered through curators depositors already trust to manage risk.

Stables like BOLD remain limited mainly by liquidity depth, no centralized issuer means slower growth and narrower markets. Creating niche yield opportunities for more crypto-native institutions that prefer fully onchain collateral and redemption mechanics can directly drive minting and generate a positive flywheel for their ecosystem.

Methodology

Scope

This write-up focuses on a descriptive assessment of onchain liquidity curation in Morpho Vaults, measured as assets supplied into vaults and attributed to curators and chains.

Outside of scope:

• Offchain revenue/fees for curators (consulting, market making, private agreements).

• Curator profitability or operating costs beyond their onchain fee revenue.

• Borrow-side demand metrics except when needed to explain a vault's strategy context.

Definitions and interpretations

• Morpho Blue: the permissionless lending protocol developed by Morpho. It replaces pooled lending with isolated markets, where each market is defined by a specific collateral-borrow asset pair and a fixed risk configuration (oracle, loan-to-value, liquidation parameters). See full definition here and Morpho Docs here.

• Market size liquidity: the total capital supplied or deposited into a protocol or venue, often expressed as TVL, AUM, or total deposits. It represents capital presence, not borrowing capacity, and does not account for how much of that capital is already in use.

• Immediate borrowable capacity: unused borrowing available to borrowers and to vault allocators deploying into Blue markets. We compute immediate borrowable liquidity in Morpho Blue by taking month-end onchain market state (total supply minus total borrows per market) and valuing it in USD, according to prices.usd and fallback prices manually assessed and listed under "Fallbacks" here. This captures how much capital could be borrowed at that moment, not how much has been deposited. The metric includes only Morpho Blue markets and excludes idle vault liquidity and legacy Morpho v1/v1.1 positions routed to Aave and Compound.

• AUM / curated supply: We use the vault's onchain supplied assets aggregated by curator address and chain. For each vault, supplied balance in underlying units and convert to USD using the price feed used in the query, grouped by curator address and sum across vaults and chains.

• Performance fee refers to the fee from vault yield as defined in Morpho's Vault fee structure docs.

• Management fee refers to AUM-based fees introduced with Vaults V2 as defined in Morpho's Vault fee structure docs.

• When we refer to "most profitable vaults", we mean "highest fee revenue accrued onchain" within the observed period (not net profit).

• Fee revenue rankings are derived from onchain fee accrual over the specified time window in the query, as provided by Morpho's Vault Curator transparency dashboard.

• Asset composition statements (e.g., "USDC dominates," "USDC+USDT is X%"): For a given curator and chain refers to sum USD supply by underlying asset, divided by total supply for that curator in X chain.

• Curator rankings, "today vs a year ago," and asset composition figures are treated as snapshots. "Today" values are taken between January 6th and 11th in the referenced queries and "a year ago" values are taken by applying the query's / historical view to the comparable date range.

• Vault-level vs market-level: Morpho V2 vaults can allocate into Morpho markets (and V1 markets). In sections that discuss fee layers, we treat:

• Vault-level fees as the fee configured at the vault layer.

• Underlying-market fees/incentives as separate fees but potentially seed as additive to the depositor's observed APY. This is why we note incentives and fee competition as economic drivers. Note that a curator can set 0% at the V2 layer while value still accrues at underlying layers.

• Cross-protocol allocation statements (e.g., Spark SLL "% allocated to Morpho") should not be mixed with Morpho "total TVL" numbers without clarifying that one is a treasury allocation view and the other is protocol TVL.

Data sources

This report combines insights from protocol dashboards from Morpho, Spark and Entropy Advisors together with our own dashboards and analysis based on a general assessment of vaults and curators and available information.

Morpho and liquidity sources:

• Morpho primary sources including documentation for vault mechanics, fee structures, and V2 roles/timelocks. Morpho queries for curator labels, and Morpho's UI for vault configuration, and per-vault fee settings.
• Liquidity curation overview relies on public data points provided by Morpho and Entropy Advisors, publicly available through Dune.
• Morpho Blue Market data directly depends on data points indexed and available through Dune.

Curator data sources:

• Exposure by risk tier, asset exposure by vault type, total curated supply as a % of total were manually collected, as such depend on reported metrics by curators and in Morpho's UI.
• Total curated supply per curator: source data aggregates Morpho vault balances at the vault level. Only supply-side balances are considered (total assets supplied), not borrow utilization or available liquidity. All balances are expressed in USD terms using the prices embedded in the source query. Vault-level balances are first grouped at the (chain, underlying asset) level. Assets with at least $10M in supplied value on a given chain are shown explicitly by their underlying symbol, assets below are grouped into a single "Other" category per chain. The purpose is visual clarity rather than economic reclassification; no assets are excluded.
• Curator-level asset curation analysis was reconstructed from on-chain indexed data using Dune, aggregating vault balances at the (curator, chain, underlying asset) level and summing USD-denominated supply across all vaults curated by each curator. Asset lists were manually reviewed before applying any bucketing. Asset classification was applied consistently across curators using a fixed taxonomy based on economic exposure and token-level yield characteristics. Category membership was expanded where curator-specific assets in the case of Felix. Where required for readability, long-tail assets were grouped under "Others" to preserve total curated supply per curator.
• Total curated supply and fee revenue relies on public data points provided by Morpho dashboards.
• Spark (also labeled as SparkDAO) assessment and current allocation shares numbers relies on Spark's transparency dashboard created by Block Analitica for allocated assets distribution. Messari report cited and Spark's newsletter for historical/interpretive context on Spark and SLL.

Stablecoin landscape sources:

• Stablecoin market caps are taken as point-in-time snapshots from public market data aggregators (CoinGecko) on January 9, 2026, except for: BOLD, USDhl, USDCV and EURCV. Liquity's BOLD market cap was sourced from CoinMarketCap. USDHL circulating supply is not tracked by CoinGecko or CoinMarketCap, the metric was sourced from self-reported disclosures. EURCV and USDCV metrics were sourced from self-reported disclosures by SG-Forge.

Other sources:

• Merkl blog for the Coinbase integration.

Known limitations

• Labels and curator identities: Curator names are mapped from known addresses in public dashboards, new curator entities or address changes can lag in labeling.

• Indexed data: This report was compiled with the available indexed data on Dune.

• Price and market cap drift: USD conversions depend on price sources used in the analytics stack, in market-side borrowable capacity this included additional stablecoin market caps are snapshots and will vary day to day.

• Chain coverage differences: Not every dashboard/query covers every chain equally, we gave more importance to Ethereum, Base, Arbitrum and Unichain as they have high TVL in Morpho and/or are chains where we operate.